A ' vVOl\1i\N of ahout fifty looks at a Marin exhibition in he- wilderment. She turns to StIeg- litz: 'Is there someone who can ex- plain these pictures to me? I don't un- derstand them at all. T want to know why they arouse no èmotion in me.' Before Stieglitz quite realizes what he is saying, he replies, 'Can you tel] l11e this: Why don't you give me an erection?' He walks back into his office. The woman acts as though she isn't quite sure she has heard him cor- rectly." Neither is the reader of this passage in "Alfred Stieglitz, An i\mer- ican Seer," by Dorothy Norman (i\p- erture; thirty-five dollars). Nothing that has come before in the long text that accompanies the book's photo- graphs has prepared him for this ribald- ry. The man who has all too insist- ently emerged frol11 Miss Norman's worshipful biography is a person of such surpassing pomposity, sententious- ness, emotional dullness, and Teutonic humorlessness that it is hard to credit hil11 with a dirty mind, let alone with being the most gifted and daring of American photographers and one of the moSt radical and inti uential of forces in American modernism. But the photographs are there to con- firm the artistic reputation-the WIn- ter view of the Flatiron Buildin g, the stage plowing througl1 ;) snowstorm down Fifth i\ venue, the immi- grants in the steerage, the portraits of Georgi3 O'Keeffe are among the classIcs well reproduced in the book-and the facts (not easily extracted from Miss Norman's overde- tailed and undercritical text) support his historical position. Stieglitz almost singlehanded dislodged photography from its situ- ation at the turn of the century as a kind of genteel hobby and propelled It into the mainstream of modern art. This achievement was carried out in two stages and was buttressed by two ideas. The first of them was giving a name-the Photo-Secession-to what was then (1 902) the mo,,;t advanced tendency In pho- tography, one whose ex- ponents modelled their pho- BOOKS T'lRJO P}zotographers togl aphs on paintings by Impressionist, SymbolIst, and Pre-Raphaelite paint- ers. Like Lawrence i\Jloway's coinage "Pop i\rt," Stieglitz's label gave defini- tion and direction to something that was not all that definite and direct, and provided both practitioners and public with a point of departure. Today, the Photo-Secession is largely viewed as a misguided attempt to make photogra- phy an art form bv turning it into a bastard form, and compared to subse- quent achievel11ents-such as the work of \Valker Evans, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Paul Strand-the misty, dreamy landscapes and hlurred romantic portraits of gowned ladies and marmoreal naked children ( achieved bv out-of-focus lenses and manipulated negatives and prints) are strained and unreal. But if one looks back to photography he fore the Photo-Secession-to such anecdotal "art photographs" as Henry Peach H..ohinson's "Fading i\ way" (a staged tableau showing a dying girl attended hy her grief-stricken family) and the hleak geography-book pIctures of for- eign cities and exotic landscapes-the pictorial school assumes its proper sig- nificance. i\lthough photography went " . I " ( 0 I h h . stralg 1t I.e., p 10tograp ers put t elr lenses back in to focus and stopped 223 scratching theIr negatives and smearing their printing paper with gum bichro- Inate) a few years after its most "crooked" period, it has retained the essential pictorialism of the Photo- Secessionists. \Vhat has changed is the literalness of photography's relation- ship to painting: photographs no long- er exhibit the surface qualities of paint- ings dnd drawings, but they retain painting's formalism. i\lthough Stieg- litz was among the least painterly of the Photo-Secessionists, he tolerated any manipulations hy his colleagues, provided that they held to the 11lore fundamental pictorialism that he, cor- rectly, felt was the crux of photogra- phy's liberation from its mechanical basis and of its transformation into an clrt fornl. The aliveness and spontaneity that hIS et:lrly photographs display as no other contel11porary's do were accom- panied by the strictest pictorial for- Inabsm, and tlus-a prerequisite for all else-was the real lesson of the Master. Stieglitz's second and more extraor- dinary innovation was to show, in Ius gallery at 291 Fifth ..Avenue (it came to he known simply as "291"), the most t:ld vanced painting and sculpture of the day along with the work of the Photo-Secessionists. Picasso, Cézanne, Picabia, Rodin, Marin, Hartley, I)ovc, ) ) j n ) ):) ì)Jj -.à ) ));\ <))